RICHARD CAMPANELLA BOOK TALK AND SIGNING
On Saturday, February 19, 2011, at noon, Tulane geographer and award-winning author Richard Campanella will be in Chicago to speak at the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, 357 West Chicago Avenue, about his latest book, Lincoln in New Orleans: The 1828-1831 Flatboat Voyages and Their Place in History.
According to the publisher's website, Lincoln's 1828 trip down the Mississippi River to New Orleans "marked his first visit to a major city and exposed him to the nation’s largest slave marketplace. It also nearly cost him his life, in a nighttime attack in the Louisiana plantation country. That trip, and a second one in 1831, would form the two longest journeys of Lincoln’s life, his only visits to the Deep South, and his foremost experience in a racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse urban environment."
"Lincoln in New Orleans: The 1828–1831 Flatboat Voyages and Their Place in History reconstructs, to levels of detail and analyses never before attempted, the nature of those two journeys and examines their influence on Lincoln’s life, presidency, and subsequent historiography. It also sheds light on river commerce and New Orleans in the antebellum era, because, as exceptional as Lincoln later came to be, he was entirely archetypal of the Western rivermen of his youth who traveled regularly between the “upcountry” and the Queen City of the South."
"Featuring new data sources, historical photos, and custom-made analytical maps and graphs, Lincoln in New Orleans brings new knowledge to one of the least-known but most influential episodes in Lincoln's life."
Campanella recommends this free public event to anyone interested in "New Orleans history, Mississippi Valley geography, and their connection with Illinois' favorite son."
Click here to read a recent Times-Picayune article about this fascinating new book.
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Caravaggio's crimes exposed in Rome's police files, from the BBC.
Caravaggio's friendships, daily life and frequent brawls - including the one which brought him a death sentence from Pope Paul V - are described in handwritten police logs, legal and court parchments all bound together in heavy tomes - and carefully preserved in this unique repository of Rome's history during the Renaissance and after....
The documents that record Caravaggio's life in Rome are written in a mixture of Latin legal jargon and racy Italian vernacular that any modern Roman could easily understand.
They needed careful restoration, as parts of the parchment were breaking up - the acid in the ink literally devouring the pages.
A handful of sponsors including a local bus company and the Italian Land Rover distributors helped to fund the work. The Italian Culture Ministry has slashed budgets this year as part of Italy's austerity programme and libraries and archives have been particularly badly hit.
The restored files provide the historical context for the sellout show in Rome last year, when more than three-quarters of a million visitors queued for hours in stifling summer heat to see some 50 of the mad, bad and dangerous painter's works.
2 comments:
I've seen "The Taking of Christ," which hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland. Thought for years to be a copy, it had hung in a Jesuit rectory in Dublin until authenticated in 1993. It's absolutely stunning, as riveting a piece of art as I've seen.
Have you seen a Caravaggio?
I live in NYC. I have visited quite a few world class museums in several nations, some of them more frequently than others, and some only once, as chance allowed. I've been to Italy more than once.
Love, C.
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